


Periscope

by lutece



Category: Fallout 4
Genre: Family Feels, Gen, Original Character(s)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-24
Updated: 2016-05-24
Packaged: 2018-06-10 10:38:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,800
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6953281
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lutece/pseuds/lutece
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Father/Shaun sees his mother for the first time in the flesh--or, on a screen, at least.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Periscope

**Author's Note:**

> because fuck you fandom I love my old son. Henry is an OC and belongs to a good friend

Noon-time struck and designated to Shaun and the few scientists close enough to know about his personal— _project_ that it had been exactly a week and a half since he’d freed his mother from the vault. He swayed them all into the control room for the cameras through the Synthetic Avian Programme—himself, Allie, Henry, Dr Holdren, and Dr Thompson—and allowed them to prepare the feed. He was a ball of nerves though, like many things, he would never admit it openly. He was their steel-hearted Director, after all, unrelenting and unable to be bent, just like the metal beams holding the Institute together. Cold like them too; he couldn’t deny his heart had been closed since he was even a young man so that his entire focus could be science and bettering the Commonwealth, but it was only to make this moment more special now, when he was in his twilight years.

_When he understood, finally, how the world operated, and how unforgiving and bittersweet it was._

They had been observing and filming his mother for a long time, like she were just another subject in a petri-dish, but Shaun had never permitted himself to see her. He had to prepare himself. Sixty years was an entire lifetime, after all. His hair had gone white very early on with the stress of humanity’s future on his broad shoulders. It was sixty years, too, of being rejected the affection of the mothers he saw in the Institute under his reign, playing with their children and keeping them close. But since his diagnosis, he hardly knew what to think anymore.

It would be illogical to leave it any longer than now, he told himself. So he was here, committing Allie’s encouraging, sympathetic smile to his memory, letting Clayton’s soft humour wash over him, trying to feel grounded with Enrico’s kind words, standing man-to-man with Henry. They were the only ones he felt were on par with him and his vision, truly, unconditionally. Anyone else… would have simply been unsatisfactory. Only Henry and Allie truly needed to be here for their work in Facilities, but, if Shaun had to label it, he considered the others friends and appreciated their support.

“She’s just outside Diamond City now, Father,” Holdren announced, gently. “In a safer place than earlier this week. You recall the—“

“—the Mirelurk Queen,” Shaun finished for him quickly. Then, a touch of a smile and softness pulled at the wrinkled edges of his mouth, a strangely proud twinkle in his eye. “You told me she decimated it, with some quite colourful words.”

Holdren and Enrico laughed; so did Allie, whose fingers speedily worked on an illuminated control panel. Shaun grimaced to himself briefly, recognising she was gathering the live, visual data. He was so _nervous_ —only to see a woman he didn’t even know, who was thirty-six years younger, too. He would be—he _was_ wiser than her, and had seen much more, but she would still be his mother. A mother was supposed to be the caring authority for her son, not the other way around. It was one of the more jarring parts of their predicament.

“She has befriended one of the escaped synths, though,” Henry cut in with his clear tone, tinkering with the frames of his glasses. “The one we disposed of a long time ago. His processing personality is based upon Detective Nicholas Valentine—NV-X-18. They are rather close.”  

Shaun waved his hand dismissively, tugging at his sleeves. “No matter,” he said. “It’s of no consequence. Not at this moment in time. She… my mother will learn, when we invite her one day. For now, I simply want to see her.”

“Of course, Director.” Henry and Allie were at the forefront more, walking up to be side by side by the control panels. Shaun dipped his head faintly and stood stationary in the centre of the room, before the largest screen. “Begin the feed.”

He was still bracing himself on the inside when the screen flickered smoothly to life. Shaun winced involuntarily, and then let his face wash into neutrality. All of a sudden it seemed there were only Shaun and her—his _mother_ —in the room.

It was her golden hair that caught his attention firstly—dotted with dirt and grime, but still, a slick of molten gold wrapped around her head just above her shoulders and bounced here and there with each glance his mother gave. Then, Shaun’s focus dropped to her eyes—they were startlingly bright. Perhaps her time in cryogenic storage had granted her that fierce, iced appearance, in just how cobalt and otherworldly the two thin orbs were. He had only ever seen eyes like that when he had been looking at himself in his quarters’ mirror. The only damage he noticed at present was a strange trickling of white at the corner of her face, embedded in her skin, pouring down from her forehead. A loss of pigmentation as a side effect, he surmised. It was a sad fate, when he took in just how fair she was—at least, he saw, she mustn’t have lost the dark stream of freckles over her thin cheeks and nose, dipping below her peering eyes.

She looked chiselled and a little chipped away, but she was rounded and delicate, too. All of these features made her look completely girlish and foreign against the rugged backdrop of the Commonwealth. This was not a girl, however, Shaun knew. This was his mother. She dressed herself in adequate raider armour, but still looked like something out of an old magazine. Her name was Carmen, and she was laughing in the wind of the surface with that beaten-down synth. According to what they could all hear, they found narrowly missing the land miles on Tucker Memorial Bridge to be humorous.

Shaun had seen her face before and hadn’t expected anything too different. When he was a boy he had had a streak of rebellion and betrayal after Weiss told him he wasn’t a child of the Institute or its brilliant science, and stowed himself away to the surface in a stolen radiation suit. But this, now, was different. Seeing her move and articulate herself upon a landscape like a grand painting, as compared to an irradiated photograph with hardly any colour left in it.

“Oh, Director,” Holdren burst out. “She’s beautiful.”

Shaun ignored what could be considered as the botanist stepping out of line because he wholeheartedly agreed. If this was love then it was warm and encompassing and more terrifying than anything an old man could feel. “Henry,” he began, turning at his waist to gesture to the tall man watching his reactions since his fixation was entirely on Carmen, “I have need of more from you, if you please.”

“Anything, Father,” Henry said automatically, sharing a united glance with Allie beside him.

“That synth looks like good company to her, but it isn’t a sufficient form of protection,” Shaun told him. “I’d like—at an appropriate distance but still rather detached—some standardised synths to watch over her, to be there more directly to— _intervene_. I can’t have her aware of our presence just yet, but I think… watching so _obtusely_ will no longer be an option.”

“Might I suggest a courser as well, Father?” Henry asked, touching his glasses again. “She has been looking for you with powerful resolve.”

The Director nodded to himself. “Yes, a courser, too. That will be more than enough to—keep her safe. Among those savages,” he added, drawling to himself and staring at Carmen’s lively form—she was scrambling over some chalked rocks now with her nose wrinkled up, “I’m amazed she has survived this long. It is a quality I…”

He stopped himself. Nobody would know until the end of this project of his plans to transfer his heavy crown to his mother, overriding the vast skills other scientists provided, especially Ayo, rooted in a bias he had never shown before in his life. But he had tried his best, in recent years, to carve something more hospitable out of the Institute so that the burden wouldn’t be as great as his own had been. The failed attempt to enter an era with the Institute where it was fully open and exposed to the world had been thwarted ever since the incident with the synth massacre and was a personal failure he would forever feel accountable for—but Shaun would never let his mother take one of his catastrophes on like that.  

Shaun had spent an achingly long amount of time warming the scientists and civilians up to the idea of another leader that may have strikingly contrasting plans—a leader that would, unknowingly, be a foreign entity. It was hard enough with all of them knowing that he wasn’t even one of them, though he had forced himself with great success into their coterie—and, with even more pushing, he knew he would be able to accomplish a smooth takeover with Carmen just the same.

“I suppose that is enough for now,” he said, after clearing his throat. Very slowly and reluctantly, he dragged his eyes away from the sunny colours of cream, blonde and blue, that existed only sincerely in his mother’s profile. He turned to address the scientists, who were more intrigued in watching himself than the woman on the screen. Of course, she was just another subject to them. Seeing their Director display poignant emotion was surely an entertaining sight to them. “I just wanted to take a moment to thank you all for your continued support in my… very personal endeavour. And for contributing resources and your own time, for my whims.”

The scientists hummed and talked of how he inspired them thoroughly and endlessly no matter the project, and how they would follow him wherever. Allie caught his eye with a wide smile that Shaun returned. He knew now, that he had inherited his intense blue gaze from his mother, and it made his chest momentarily swell with pride.

As he was walking out of the room, Henry softly clapped him by the shoulder. “Father,” he said, looking down upon him by a few inches, “I will dispatch the synths personally, today.”

Shaun smiled at him, too. Henry was even less of an emotional person than Shaun was, but there was a twitching tic pulling at his face in response. “Thank you, Henry,” he said softly. Shaun left the room with something more than interest growing in his heart—for this afternoon, at least, it would push down the feeling of his cancer eating away at him. His mother was alive and well and thriving even in the cesspool the Commonwealth currently was—and she loved him. This he knew.


End file.
